


Your Love is Killing Me

by mytimehaspassed



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Murder, Mutilation, Serial Killers, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-25
Updated: 2014-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-26 11:44:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1687100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Richie tells Seth the story about their father, it’s in the back of the ambulance, where they’re both trembling, Seth’s oxygen mask a little too big for his face, slipping off, Richie’s hand on Seth’s hand, careful of the burns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Love is Killing Me

**YOUR LOVE IS KILLING ME**  
FROM DUSK TILL DAWN: THE SERIES  
Seth/Richie  
 **WARNINGS** : Spoilers for the series; murder; graphic violence and mutilation; serial killing  
 **NOTES** : This is an AU for everything that happened at the end of the season one finale.

  
**i.**

The first time Richie tells Seth the story about their father, it’s in the back of the ambulance, where they’re both trembling, Seth’s oxygen mask a little too big for his face, slipping off, Richie’s hand on Seth’s hand, careful of the burns. Richie says it through tears, but – even then – Seth knows that it’s for the benefit of the EMTs, who crowd them together, swathed in heavy, itchy blankets, whose hands feel cold and numb on Seth’s burned skin, who look at Richie first and then at Seth and then at the bruises between them and don’t say a word.

The second time, they’re in the hospital, Richie refusing to leave Seth’s side, and it’s for the cops who sit down in the uncomfortable, hard-backed visitor chairs and ask them the tough questions – was their father volatile, angry, did he threaten them with violence, did he ever hurt them – and one of them, a quiet, determined woman who looks at them first with pity and then with understanding, mentions something about an accelerant and Seth watches Richie’s mouth flatten first before trembling again, the tears falling fast and hard.

He always talked about burning the house down, Richie tells the police, picking at the bandages on Seth’s arms absentmindedly, a habit he’ll keep for the next couple of weeks. Here, now, he looks up, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose innocently, saying, He always talked about killing us.

Seth doesn’t say anything, his eyes locked on Richie’s hands.

Richie says, If I hadn’t have woken up in time, his voice stopping, choked, starting again, If I hadn’t have gotten Seth out in time. Here he looks at Seth, his eyes big and wet, his mouth a watery line, and Seth can’t turn his head, won’t turn his head to look at the cops buying this performance because if he does he might not be able to hold it together, he might not be able to stop the truth from tumbling out of his mouth, from shouting can’t you see, can’t you see, can’t you see that he’s lying.

The woman makes a sound that’s almost compassionate, and she places a strong hand on Richie’s shoulder and calls him a brave boy and Richie almost laughs right there, Seth can see it in the quiver of his lips, but he keeps his head down until they leave.

Seth never asks Richie for the truth, but only because he doesn’t have to.

***

If he says the lie enough times – to social workers and probation officers and, later, Vanessa in the fast food restaurant before El Rey – maybe he will start to believe.

 

 

**ii.**

The trip back to the States is uneventful, Richie lying prone in the backseat and Seth with his hands gripping the steering wheel hard enough to break, the windows down, the radio too loud, the car smelling like blood. Over the border, they stop at a fleabag motel that rents by the hour, Seth only needing five, six tops to recharge before he has to keep on driving, Richie waiting in the car while Seth pays for the room, the man behind the counter not saying a word about the request for only one bed.

Richie is almost entirely covered in thick, rust-colored blood, all of which seems to have seeped from his own body, the pale skin, the darkened eyes, the quick, hungry bites he takes out of (first) his burger and (then) Seth’s, inhaling the meat like he’s been starving since the Titty Twister, and Seth finds himself saying, “Careful,” when Richie starts to choke.

Saying, “Hey now,” his hand warm on Richie’s.

He doesn’t leave Richie’s side until the morning, slips under the covers with him like he used to when they were little, pulls him close and feels Richie breathe into his neck, his lips wet where they touch Seth’s skin, and Richie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t tell him to stop when Seth presses his mouth to Richie’s cheekbone, light and feathery, reassuring.

“I know a doctor in Odessa,” he says, his hands on Richie’s back. “He can look at whatever she did to you, maybe be able to fix it.”

Richie closes his eyes.

“If he can’t do anything, I’m sure he knows someone else.” Seth presses another kiss on Richie’s face, on the bridge of his nose, and Richie makes a sound in his throat, low, almost guttural. “There’s got to be someone who knows what to do.” Seth kisses him again, on the chin, and once more on the neck, and then Richie grabs his face, pressing their mouths together, and Seth pulls him in and says something embarrassingly stupid like I’ve missed this, his voice hoarse between them, I’ve missed you, his voice rough with unshed tears.

It’s been since before El Rey, what they used to have, since before Seth planned the bank heist, and Seth knows that Richie has wanted to, knows like he knows that Richie would never initiate this, knows like he knows that he’s always the one to start and stop, to pull Richie in and then push him away again.

Richie says something that Seth can’t hear, so he moves back, raking his eyes hungrily over Richie’s face, cataloguing the differences between now and before, and Richie’s mouth is red, swollen, begging to be touched and goddamn but Seth really has missed this, has missed this since the joint, since Richie ran away to the woods, since their days before when it was them and it was the world.

“What?” Seth asks, tracing a finger over Richie’s cheek, over his mouth and down his chin.

Richie looks at him, and it’s then that Seth can see it, the thing beneath his skin, the thing that’s taken over his older brother’s body, the thing like a mask slipping over his brother’s face. Richie smiles and says, “There’s nothing for you to fix, Seth.”

Says, “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

Smiling, smiling, Richie’s mouth red enough to be mistaken for blood, says, “This is who I am.”

 

 

**iii.**

They’re three miles from Tulsa when Richie begs him to stop.

“Please,” Richie says, his arm curling around his stomach. “Please, Seth.”

The unspoken rule since El Rey is that Seth doesn’t know about this. He doesn’t want to know about this – this, whatever Richie is doing when Seth turns his head for five minutes, this, whatever Richie is doing to survive. The closest thing to them is a nursing home and – Jesus fuck, Seth thinks – he pulls into the rectangle of the parking lot and turns the engine off.

Richie pulls him close, kisses him roughly, sharply, on the mouth, his teeth biting and scraping Seth’s lips, before he opens the door and walks outside, a dark smudge against the burning brightness of the sun.

Seth waits.

 

 

**iv.**

He got the tattoo after he lost a bet. The design is a permanent remnant of a lost decade, but at least it covers the scars, something Richie was almost forlorn about the next time he saw him – (“They made you look cool,” he says, when Seth leans over in bed to light a cigarette and Richie’s eyes burn holes in the exposed skin there, the naked skin that looks almost virginal next to the tattoos, almost delicate.) – and at least it’s symbolic.

Symbolic not so much as a fuck you to their father, or even a reminder of him, but in the way that it’s a mark for Seth and for Richie and for the fire, and (mostly) for all of the ways in which they were saved.

He looks at it now and wonders if it wasn’t all a little premature.

 

 

**v.**

In Wichita, Richie leaves a boy on the motel bed.

It’s not like the bank teller, Seth can tell that from the doorway. Richie is curled like a snake around the body, his nose tucked into the hollow of the boy’s neck, right above two little bloodless holes. Seth drops the takeout bag on the table and collapses into the chair, feeling suddenly limbless.

Richie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to explain, and Seth watches him from between his fingers, breathing in and out slowly, so slowly. His voice is hoarse when he finally speaks, almost as if he hasn’t opened his mouth in years, “Where did he come from?”

“Downstairs, two rooms over,” Richie says, and his voice is a little muffled. He sits up and there’s dried blood on his face, on his hands, and he starts to lick his fingers clean. “His mother went to a job interview, left him alone.”

Seth breathes in, breathes out. “How old is he?” His voice squeaks on that one.

Richie shrugs. “He said he was sixteen, but I think he was lying.”

“Did you,” Christ, “did you touch him?”

“Seth,” Richie says, but Seth cuts him off.

“Did you fucking touch him, Richard?” This, this idea is more repulsive than what Richie has already done, and Seth feels the anger roil inside of him, start to lick at his insides, travel like fire up his spine.

“No,” Richie says, and here he climbs off the bed and gets down on his knees in front of Seth. He places both dirty hands on Seth’s lap. “No. He kissed me and his mouth tasted like soda, but I pushed him off and told him that I couldn’t do it. We watched a movie and I bought him some candy from the vending machine, but when he wanted to leave, I just couldn’t,” here Richie looks down at his hands and then back up at Seth, his face blurring from Seth’s tears, his face elongated, a mess of colors, “I couldn’t let him go. He wanted to leave, but I couldn’t let him, not without a taste.”

He presses up against Seth, presses his lips to Seth’s lips, cold, lifeless. “Just one taste,” he says, and Seth can’t breathe, Richie pulling the life from him.

“He tasted so good, Seth,” Richie whispers, and Seth starts to sob.

 

 

**vi.**

Seth burns down the motel.

They watch the footage on the local news channel in a diner six towns over, Seth staring blankly at the television, forgetting to eat. The boy was the only one to die in the fire, and the news station cuts to footage of his family, a mother and a little sister and a mess of cousins who all blink up at the camera with wet eyes, blaming the unsafe conditions, blaming the motel owner, blaming God. Seth looks away when the mother ambles up to the microphone, her face as white as a sheet.

Richie squirts ketchup on his eggs and says, “At least you pulled the fire alarm first.”

 

 

**vii.**

Fuck you, Seth thinks when the first victim he chooses fights back. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

He strokes the hair from her face. “Can’t you see that I’m just trying to help my brother survive?”

Her hands are bound, so she spits in his face.

Richie tears her throat out.

***

Seth can’t watch Richie eat.

He sits in a Starbucks until it’s over, plausible deniability, ordering three cups of some sort of ostentatious coffee, picking at the paper sleeve until it shreds in his hands. He plans jobs in his mind, plans and executes and revisits and re-strategizes and eventually ends up with money and a house and Vanessa somewhere, somewhere tropical and lush. A barista pushing around a wet rag on one of the adjacent tables asks him if he’s working on a novel, and he gives an uneasy smile and leaves.

He passes four potential victims on his way back to the car, and he sits in the driver’s seat for a while, his fingers tight on the steering wheel, pretending that he doesn’t want to just leave now, drive away without going back to the motel first, without picking up Richie. He tracks number one getting into her own car, an easy, boost-able model, sees number three pull out change from his pocket and feed it to the parking meter, and for the first time in a really long time, he wishes his parents were still alive.

 

 

**viii.**

St. Louis is a widow, and Richie chases her up her own winding staircase, his claws making indentations in the cherry-colored wood. She doesn’t give up easily, but neither does he.

***

Louisville is a rentboy, one who came highly recommended, his clean fingernails scratching down Richie’s chest before he states his prices – “It will be more if it’s both of you,” he says bluntly, almost bored, pulling his shirt over his head. Richie plays with him first, and Seth can hear the man’s screams from the other side of the wall, the pleading and crying and praying to God, the rolling waves of fear until Richie finally, finally rips out his tongue.

***

Columbus is a bookie who sneers at the Gecko Brothers both and tells them that they have a lot of nerve showing their faces in Ohio again. This one is known to them, not so low-risk as Seth would have wanted, but it’s something both of them have wanted to do since this started.

The only noise he makes is when Richie pulls out his lungs – a small, rasping, rattling sound – and even then it’s only because he can’t help it.

 

 

**ix.**

On the way to Baltimore, Richie asks him who else he would kill if he had the chance.

Seth sighs.

“I would kill Dad again,” Richie says in the silence of the car, and Seth doesn’t let himself move, doesn’t let himself make a sound. “It was too quick the first time around.”

“Fuck, Richard,” Seth says, and Richie laughs, pulls his sunglasses off, squints at him in the bright light.

“Come on, Seth. Who would you kill?”

***

He doesn’t say it.

He wants to, he wants to so badly, but he doesn’t. He can’t.

***

Richie’s never been a fool.

 

 

**x.**

There’s no riding into the sunset with this one.

***

He breaks his legs so he won’t follow. He breaks his arms so he can’t crawl. He duct tapes his mouth so he can’t call out.

Before Richie leaves, Seth nods his head in the direction of the whiskey bottle on the table and Richie allows him a drink, if at least to numb the pain, Seth’s neck long and hollow as Richie pulls his head up, prying the duct tape off, fitting the glass to Seth’s mouth, upending it until Seth can’t breathe.

Seth chokes once, coughs, then says, quietly, “Thank you.”

There’s no question in his voice, he doesn’t ask why Richie is doing this, but Richie replies just the same.

“Can’t you see,” Richie says, his fingers on Seth’s cheeks. Seth looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes, with blood on his cheekbone, with the tattoo that wraps around his arm like a scar. “Can’t you see that I’m only doing this to survive?”

Seth opens his mouth, but Richie replaces the tape, kissing him through it.

***

He tries, he really does, his fingers trembling where he holds it, just outside the door, the light from the sun crawling across the sky in liquid movement, Seth’s grunts and groans of pain just inside, just out of reach, the smell of gasoline thick and pungent in the air, Richie’s fingers as he holds the box, as he pulls one out to strike, but – fuck.

He doesn’t light the match.  



End file.
